Mon, November 11, 2013 • 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM • GAR 4.100

Dominic Yang, IHS Fellow, recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia and was a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation postdoctoral fellow at UBC. He will be a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica in Taipei in summer 2013, before beginning his fellowship at the Institute for Historical Studies in 2013-2014. Dr. Yang presented at the "Transpacific China in the Cold War" conference in April 2013, convened by Professor Madeline Y. Hsu, and sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies. He is currently rewriting his dissertation, "The Great Exodus: Sojourn, Nostalgia, Return, and Identity Formation of Chinese Mainlanders in Taiwan, 1940s-2000s" (Nov 2012), and his research interests focus on collective trauma/social memory, Cold War history, and Chinese migration.

"The workshop paper is a revised version of the most important chapter in my Ph.D. dissertation entitled Narrating the Exodus," writes Dr. Yang. "Starting with a resurgence of remembrance and cultural activities surrounding a long-forgotten shipwreck outside of Shanghai in 1949, the paper chronicles how the great mainland exodus to Taiwan following the Chinese civil war has been portrayed in selected texts through time from the 1950s to the 1990s—in state-sponsored propaganda texts, popular novels, personal memoirs, and theatrical plays. It illustrates the historical process whereby narrating collective trauma of the exodus became the 'founding myth' or 'founding trauma' for the mainlander identity formation in contemporary Taiwan."

Sponsored by: Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History

All architectural drawings are from the Alexander Architectural Archive at the University of Texas at Austin, sheets 6, 13, 14, and 17. The logo was inspired by a detail from the drawings. Images are either copyrighted by the University or used under fair use laws. Any unauthorized use or duplication is prohibited.